October 2007 Archives

It's pretty much a given fact that if a video exists on the internet anywhere, it's made its way to YouTube. Even old flash videos (like, 2000 old. Ancient, in internet terms) that existed long before YouTube ever did have somehow found their way to this vast repository of internet history.

Utilizing a unique .FLV video container, it allows for the upload of video files in a high-efficiency, modern video codec, with a Flash frontend ensuring excellent cross-platform compatibility with no compatibility concerns for the end user. Its wild success is widely attributed to simplicity and universality of use, undoubtedly lending to its immense amount of sophisticated, artistic material.

On a vein connecting to our previous unit, YouTube also contains a number of social networking features, consolidating all of one's video creations on a profile page, as well as providing for video commenting, and "video responses".

The next site is more than a simple video hosting site, but it has a somewhat dubious reputation about it. eBaum's World has been involved in a number of disputes between online communities, one notably being YTMND. Eric Bauman, owner of eBaum's World, has been accused of stealing original materials from other sites on the internet, slapping an eBaum's World watermark on, and hosting it on his own site, thus directly profiting from others' work. This then prompted a backlash from a number of online communities. Despite its dubious nature, eBaum's World continues to be extremely popular, most likely frequented by those who aren't aware of the controversy surrounding the site. It contains a variety of materials, including viral images and games as well as video content. It features very few networking features, limited mainly to commenting on posted items.

JibJab is an entirely different type of site altogether. Responsible for a number of wildly famous political Flash videos, they themselves strive to remain politically neutral in an attempt to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. While their videos are purely Flash in nature, they too have found their way to YouTube.

Naturally, due to the videos' political basis, they always see a surge in popularity around election time. JibJab does not merely limit itself to political videos anymore, though, it's undeniable that it's what made them famous.

Though all these sites do contain videos, they're all extremely different in nature. You've got YouTube, for content creators, eBaum's World, for content consumers, and JibJab, for those of us who want a lighthearted, fun look at the current political atmosphere.

What is Digital Ethnography? It is the manifestation of everyone's secret desire to become internet superstars. YouTube's unique ability to allow anyone to post anything about themselves are what allows internet phenomena and fads to become what they are. Nearly every online community has its own distinctive culture to it, complete with written rules, mores, and cultural icons. YouTube is no exception. Through the practice of digital ethnography and the study of online cultures, we can, hopefully, better understand how people interact with one another not only in the digital realm, but within the real one as well.

The three social networks explored included three I'm somewhat familiar with, and have used (albeit, some briefly) in the past. These networks are Facebook, Myspace, and Livejournal.

Of all these, personally, I find Facebook the most appealing. For the past few years of its existence, the more professional-looking interface, the much cleaner layout drew me to it over Myspace. Wow, I hated Myspace. I couldn't go to any of my friends' profiles without being bombarded by a cacophony of simultaneous auto-playing embedded music combined with the latest flash games and "funnny must seee" YouTube videos. My eyes are, at the same time, being assaulted by a misshapen, overly-compressed JPEG image as a background, with a font face and color that proves to be entirely unreadable. That's alright, though. Anything important would have undoubtedly been in big flashing GIF images.

This is changing, however. With the somewhat-recent launch of Facebook's application API, it has somewhat opened the door for the Myspace-ization of the site. People can not only already add music, videos, and old NES video games to their profiles, but one can also, just like on Myspace, show the world the friends they like most. Clutter is great.

The functionality of Myspace and Facebook are largely the same, and undoubtedly, the forerunners of the social networking craze. When someone says "social networking", Myspace and Facebook are what immediately come to mind. Built for networking first, and blogging/photos/sending virtual alcoholic beverages second, these represent social networking in its purest, most unadulterated form.

Honestly, though, I'm not sure how anyone navigates Myspace. Even if you can somehow stumble through the clashing, cluttered layout, nobody enters any real information about themselves into their profiles, so finding people in a directory search is nigh impossible. This is actually manageable with Facebook, though. Facebook has extremely strong and useful search features, which is another reason why I actually care to use the site.

Livejournal is... different. A community not founded on ranking friends in order of preference, or reposting the same "SEND THIS 2 ALL UR FRIENDS OR U WILL DIE TOMORROW THSI IS NOT A JOKE" bulletin, it represents what I believe is a slightly less active community, but one that retains a much greater sense of dignity, and maturity.

They are, essentially, blogs. With a friends list. One puts far more thought into a blog post than a Myspace bulletin. They're far more permanent. One "networks" through subscribing to other blogs, which aggregate in an RSS-like fashion in a "friends" page.

One interesting thing I've found in my limited, but nevertheless existent Livejournal experience is that it has a much higher occurrence of networks of friends in where few members actually know others in real life. Livejournal friend networks frequently stem from a common interest, or thread, where online friendships are built, offering others insight into their lives through their blog postings. Fascinating. I know.

This may seem like a lot of praise for Livejournal, though, it never really caught on with me. Perhaps it was the simple lack of my friends using it (thus necessitating finding people I don't even know and will never meet to network with), or just the dead silence and sterility of it, but I, sadly, abandoned my Livejournal not long after creating it. Years later, it sits quietly, stagnant but resolute, faithfully awaiting my return, which most likely will never occur.

...I don't have the heart to delete it.

Hm. Apparently there are social networking sites aside from the ubiquitous Facebook and Myspace. These lesser sites, such as CarDomain, the Steam Community, and Flickr unite all their users under a common interest. However, some of these sites seem to me to not be social networks with cars, games, and photo albums, but more like car, game, and photo sites with some social networking features tacked on. In my opinion, this shouldn't qualify it as a "social networking" site, but, that's neither here nor there.

With the social networking juggernauts' already massive installed userbase, the only way these smaller startups can hope to ever compete is to appeal to this common interest to garner user activity, and, hopefully, ad revenue. Such is the nature of Ning, the focus of yet another project we're working on. Our group has a pretty good thing going thus far, and, we're rather excited about how it's turning out.

Stay tuned.

With the explosive popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, some people seem to have an insatiable desire to post pictures of themselves participating in less-than-legal activities.

Ars Technica: Google + Facebook + Alcohol = Trouble

This article, I feel, is rather relevant, as it mentions a recent incident at Penn State. Following a victory over Ohio State, a number of students took it upon themselves to try and uproot the goalposts. They succeeded. The goalposts were then carried out of the stadium, and someone proceeded to create a Facebook group for all involved. The campus police then used photographic evidence found in this group to identify an additional number of perpetrators.

Among some other incidents involving students getting in trouble with authorities based on information found on Facebook, this article also offers the same advice we've heard so many times: "Be careful what you put online". Nothing new to see here.

GlobeandMail: The Hazards of Facebook's Social Experiment

This slightly more recent article from a Canadian news source tells of a more recent event involving a number of eighth-graders who were barred from attending a class trip following posting some derogatory comments regarding teachers on Facebook. (Just over a year ago, this wouldn't have even been possible, as Facebook was college-only at this time.) The article then goes on to detail the history of Facebook, finally commenting on Toronto being the largest geographically-associated network on Facebook.

While all these events are unfortunate, if people simply used more discretion when posting information online, particularly that which could be considered derogatory or inflammatory towards others, or potentially harmful to oneself, many of these incidents could be avoided. Consider anything you post online to be visible to the entire world. People will find what you write, and they will identify you. Be careful. Big Brother is watching.

On the eve of the motorcycle event, I thought this might be useful for anyone else who has a notebook or desktop running Vista without a dedicated graphics processor.

Apparently Intel's new x3100 Integrated Graphics Chipset (which, for being an integrated solution, I must say is quite formidable), is presently incompatible with Second Life. Second Life will crash immediately upon opening. Getting Second Life to run requires making a small settings hack, as Intel's most recent driver does not fully support OpenGL Object Occlusion (Wikipedia Link: See "computer graphics")

This settings hack is detailed here, in the Intel Software Network forums as a cross-post from the Second Life forums.

Wanting to run Second Life on my Lenovo X61, this did the trick. Maybe it can help others, too. This integrated graphics processor can run Counter-Strike: Source on almost full settings, and the drivers are still in beta. I can't wait to see what they can do once the remainder of this card's potential is unlocked.

In class today, my group and I looked up the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies of Facebook and Myspace. These can be found here:

Facebook:
Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy

Myspace:
Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy

These statements, while sharing similarities (due primarily to the fact that they're both legal documents based on an... acceptable set of privacy standards), also naturally share some differences. For example, Facebook's privacy policy has been updated much more frequently. This is due, primarily, to the turbulent changes Facebook has seen over the past year, such as the implementation of a API for application development. This API can not only be used for application development, but it can also provide a backend for advertisers or other third parties to collect demographic information, among other tools that would prove to be useful in marketing/ad targeting. This means huge amounts of revenue for Facebook.

Nevertheless, Facebook does maintain a degree of user information control, primarily with the belief that one should hold full access control over their information.

1. You should have control over your personal information.

2. You should have access to the information others want to share.

In addition, according to Facebook's legal agreement, Facebook's license to use your personal information expires as soon as you remove the information from their site. They are still allowed to maintain a copy of your information, so, it's never truly gone. I can't imagine what use they have for this, but, they keep it anyway:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Myspace still makes a ton of money through gratuitious ad placement on nearly every square inch of their site. greater volume of profiles, as well as also tracking personal information for ad targeting.

MySpace.com also logs non-personally-identifiable information including IP address, profile information, aggregate user data, and browser type, from users and visitors to the site This data is used to manage the website, track usage and improve the website services. This non-personally-identifiable information may be shared with third-parties to provide more relevant services and advertisements to members.

Whenever you willingly submit information to the internet, there's no telling what may become of it. It could wind up anywhere, be proliferated and propagated as many times as whoever holds the information sees fit. This is the danger of the information age, which necessitates such privacy policies and terms of usage. Nevertheless, we must always remain vigilant of how large a window we open into our lives, available for the whole world to see.

Today, our IST 110H class was granted a very unique opportunity- to hear Mr. Manohar Bhattarai of Nepal's High Level Commission for Information Technology speak on the merits, challenges, and socioeconomic implications of the proliferation of information technology in the context of a developing nation. Between his photographs of villagers mounting wireless antennae in treetops and his accounts of their desires for connectivity, I found his presentation absolutely fascinating and quite enlightening.

One issue in particular that I'm glad he addressed, is one of the harshest criticisms facing the One Laptop Per Child project: If some of these people barely have the basic necessities of life, why should they be at all interested in procuring information technology resources? According to Mr. Bhattarai, in his travels to these areas, they've heard of information technology's benefits, and see it as a viable means of education. Perhaps this is the secret to bridging the educational divide, which will in turn hopefully provide a better life for the people in these developing nations.

The speech given by Mr. Bhattarai was an excellent insight to just how global information technology is, and how an underdeveloped nation is attempting to bring its connectivity infrastructure up to a more competitive level. Mr. Bhattarai is a charming man, and I'm pleased to have had the opportunity to meet him.